Buyers of IP PBXs need to look beyond
simple voice capabilities to unified
communications and make sure the
gear they buy will be compatible with
applications they will want in the future
, experts say. 

IP PBXes won’t be just about making
phone calls as they become the anchors
for UC technologies, which draw instant
messaging, presence, collaboration and business-process
applications into the mix with voice.

As long as an IP PBX has the software interfaces it needs to integrate
with UC platforms, it will be serviceable for the foreseeable future
, says Jay Lassman, an analyst with Gartner. That is a major concern
among his clients, he says.

Those who may just be moving to corporate VoIP — what Lassman
terms IP telephony — are well aware of UC and want to be sure they
make the right choice of IP PBX. "They are looking ahead to what will
be available in three years and want to know what is their investment
protection going to be like if they an IP PBX today." he says.

That protection will require that the platforms support open interfaces
to all the key applications that create UC, says Phil Hochmuth, an
analyst with the Yankee Group. “You need to think of an IP PBX as
another data center server,” he says. “How will it work with
database servers, with CRM and ERP applications? Look at it as
part of a larger IT infrastructure puzzle.”

In particular that means Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is not
necessarily the signaling protocol used by the top IP PBX vendors
today, but that all of them are moving to adopt, Hochmuth says. They
are also trying to make their implementations of SIP interoperable with
those of other vendors. For instance, Avaya says it performs
compatibility testing with other vendors' gear such as phones and with
service provider trunks.

This is good for customers but also serves Avaya’s game plan of
helping customers link business applications together with business
processes, says Lawrence Byrd, director of IP telephony and mobility
at Avaya.

It is conceivable using UC for a help desk application to spot a critical
problem and automatically launch a voice call, IM or e-mail to notify
someone who can deal with it, Byrd says, a process pulling together
multiple individual underlying applications.

"If they are all SIP-enabled it is much easier to orchestrate them to
make them work together," he says.

Microsoft and IBM loom large
The largest vendors — Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Shoretel in the
United States, are making interoperability efforts with the two big
vendors of unified communications platforms, Microsoft (Office
Communication Server) and IBM (Sametime), says Matthias
Machowinsky, an analyst with Infornetics.

Microsoft and IBM’s platforms are so compelling that they may
be freezing IP PBX decisions as potential customers digest how
UC platforms might help their businesses and how all the pieces
would fit together, Lassman says. “I think we've actually seen a
slowdown of the adoption of IP telephony as organizations try to
guess what's going to happen with these new offers from
Microsoft and IBM,” he says.[NextPage]

Both Microsoft and IBM recognize the need to cooperate with the
IP PBX vendors on interoperability to help businesses make the
leap to UC, he says.

IBM, for instance, has a close relationship with Nortel, which bundles
its IP PBX with Sametime hardware and installs it as a package to
make the transition simpler. Nortel has a close relationship with
Microsoft trying to achieve similar goals. Similar alliances abound
among the IP PBX vendors and the collaboration and messaging
vendors.

Microsoft has a different spin, developing its own PBX functionality
with OCS, with the long-term goal of supplanting PBXes. That may
be a way off still, according to Gartner.

The OCS telephony platform lacks standard PBX features such as
attendant operator, emergency services support and failover
, according to the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant report on
corporate telephony, “taking it out of the running as an all-out
replacement for a PBX or an IP PBX until at least 2010.” Gartner
ranked Microsoft high in its vision but low in its ability to execute in
IP telephony.

Similarly, Cisco is piecing together its own UC platform and a
collaboration service that could combine with its VoIP gear to deliver
UC support.

Seeking IP PBX vendors that support widely held interoperability
standards is important because no single vendor has mastered
all the broad elements that UC comprises. In addition, it leaves
open the option to use multiple vendors whose products a
business might already own or that the customer regards as
preferable. “That is an essential element if you are a business
that wants to integrate telephony into line-of-business applications
or federated dial plans with partners and expand the connectivity
of voice systems to outside entities,” he says.

Ease of integration also can play in the cost of UC, Lassman says.
“We have clients tell us that they are about to buy their last release
of an IP PBX because they are looking ahead at unified
communications and how they can wrap that in to what they're doing.

It has to do with the ability to be UC-ready, for lack of a better term,”
he says.

ROI is lacking
Most businesses have given up trying to justify VoIP based on return
on investment, according to a study by Nemertes Research. Capital
outlay for IP PBXes is about the same or more than for traditional PBXs
, operational start-up costs are higher and it takes about three times
longer to isolate and repair outages, says Robin Gareiss, Nemertes
executive vice president, in a report on the business case for VoIP.

“To be sure there can be a net savings after the first two years, but
organizations are focusing on other benefits, such as streamlined
features, improved productivity and integrated voice/data/video
collaborative applications,” Gareiss says.
When blending IP PBXes into collaboration, messaging and
presence, the cost of UC licensing will determine the customer's
starting point, Lassman says.

A Microsoft shop, for instance, will look at its current licensing and
determine whether adding UC is incremental or a significant cost
jump. "If you're starting from scratch and you have Exchange 2003
, it's going to be hard to justify UC because of the increase in the
cost of the license," he says. On the other hand, if they already have
Exchange 2007 a move to UC would cost less.

The open standards will allow customers to shop around. “If they're
starting from scratch, they could look at some other vendors,”
Lassman says.

Another way to save is by limiting UC deployment at the outset
, Lassman says. “I think some clients think they've got to do it to
everybody everywhere, but the reality of it is there's no need to,”
he says.

Regardless of how